Wider Reality

Theorizes how treating lives as “representative” has been used, in and beyond the novel, to frame the problems and paradoxes of modernity.

In the nineteenth century, claims that someone or something is “representative” began to saturate culture. Readers were asked to accept that the “representative” particular is fitted to stand in for and reflect a larger unit to which it belongs, often a class or group, because it illustrates the relevant attributes, experiences, or behaviors of that larger unit. The particular could thus purportedly be used to characterize the larger unit—a unit that often didn’t preexist the assertion of representativeness. Heather Brink-Roby considers why this discourse of representativeness surged in nineteenth-century Britain: why it became insistent and examined in domains ranging from philosophical logic and astronomy to literary criticism and the novel. Fiction offered an especially inventive site for using the dynamics of representativeness to frame certain key nineteenth-century concerns, including isolation, freedom, and modern yearning, even as representativeness developed the novel’s dual and contradictory status as both the genre of the individual and the genre of society.

Brink-Roby theorizes the complex restructuring of thought involved in the nineteenth century turn to representativeness and examines how the dynamics of representativeness itself—in addition to the content treated as representative—have shaped the way that modern existence is imagined. Offering fresh readings of novelists including Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and Thomas Martin Wheeler, and drawing on a variety of other sources such as natural history monographs, logic textbooks, and medical articles, A Wider Reality shows how representativeness became the basis of a new economy of meaning, seeing, and knowing.  

Heather Brink-Roby is assistant professor of English at the National University of Singapore. Her work has appeared in ELH, Victorian Studies, and other publications.